


Thought Crimes

by bankrobbery



Category: Deadpool (Movieverse), Deadpool - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cybernetics, Hand Jobs, M/M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Soul Bond, Team Bonding, Wire Play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 12:21:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14934183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bankrobbery/pseuds/bankrobbery
Summary: “Look, I wouldn’t want to be soul bound to Wade Wilson either,” Domino says. “But you’re dying. Maybe have some perspective.”





	Thought Crimes

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after the events of DP2, but before Ellie fixes the time turner. For the purpose of this fic Nathan doesn't have telepathy. Some liberties have been taken with timelines and the logistics of the techno-organic virus and whatever else I needed to fudge to make this happen. In other words, don’t look too closely at the scotch tape holding this whole thing together.

 

-/-  


The seam where metal is fused into his flesh aches in the cold like a brand, like it’s latched onto his bones and is holding on with desperate ferocity, but it’s an ache he’s has a long time to become accustomed to. There has been plenty of pain in his life that has been harder to ignore. After what his heart’s been through it’s difficult to imagine what his body could do to him that would really matter, but he is quickly beginning to find out he might be mistaken on that front.

His bones are expanding underneath his skin, stretching and warping like something is physically writhing inside of him that shouldn’t be. His muscles and tendons are burning as they try to accommodate his skeleton’s enthusiastic and violent decision to vacate his body. There’s pain and then there’s whatever this is that’s boiling itself alive in his bloodstream, threatening to tear him in two just to prove a point, and it’s been a long time since something brought him physically to his knees.

The totem-wielding witch they’ve been tracking for two weeks is just a child. A child who has accidentally begun opening a portal to a dimension that has no business being opened. There are symbols scrawling themselves onto the floor of the warehouse, glowing and pulsating like they’re alive, and the cluster of them Nate’s been caught in is particularly egregious. This isn’t what was supposed to happen. This isn’t what they were supposed to find at the end of this rabbit hole.

“Enough with the interdimensional wack-a-mole!” Wade yells over his shoulder at them. There’s black ooze dripping from his katanas and a pile of strangely steaming corpses that don’t look at all human at his feet. There are more not-humans crawling out of the portals that keep ripping themselves open. “I don’t want to rush you or anything, but whenever you feel like getting Doc Brown out of the demon summoning circle that would be fucking fantastic!”

“I’m trying!” the witch shrieks at him, nearly dropping her spellbook. “They don’t exactly tell you how to _reverse_ the human sacrifice, okay?!”

“You’re doing great, sweetie,” Domino tells her, then decapitates a four-legged monstrosity with a crowbar and a home-run swing before it can reach the circle. She could probably use a gun right about now, and his is lying uselessly on the floor next to him, but the last time she tried to reach past the glowing perimeter she’d gotten a foot away before it had singed the hairs on her arms. She glances at him, crowbar in hand, and continues, more genuine, “Hang in there, grandpa.”

There’s not really much else for him to do. It’s not like he can fucking _move_.

The witch continues to flip anxiously through her spell book, pages ripping at the edges from her carelessness. She’s already tried a dozen spells to get him free. “Hang on, hang on, I can fix this. I just have to - shit, I should’ve finished law school-”

Whatever she’s doing isn’t working. The symbols within the circle are getting brighter, more vivid, and they’re starting to slowly sear themselves into both the skin and metal of his palms.

It’s hard to listen to her with the blood pounding in his ears. There’s something crackling in his bloodstream that feels like static electricity building to a crescendo, as though trying to burst its way out of his body entirely. Something moves in his flesh arm, underneath the surface of his skin, like an insect that’s burrowed inside of him, and he immediately regrets every single life choice that has led him to this point.

“Holy shit fucks,” Wade says, from obnoxiously near his left ear, and Nate doesn’t know when he crossed the room. “She impregnated you with her alien babies.”

“You’re not helping,” Domino says, and maybe if they’d let her go into the warehouse first all of this could have been avoided. Maybe if they’d done a lot of shit differently his internal organs wouldn’t be attempting to rearrange themselves to better suit whatever curse this kid has strung through his veins like barbed wire.

Another portal is tearing itself open across the room, right next to where Colossus is wrestling with something large and horned that appears to be winning, and it’s expanding across the warehouse in a way that can’t be good. The symbols burning themselves into Nate’s body are attempting to tear him apart. Whatever this spell is attempting to summon is getting very close to making a grand entrance.

“Okay, maybe…. Maybe this one will work,” the spellbook in her hand is turned to a page with a worrying amount of skulls and exclamation marks. She doesn’t sound confident enough for the level of danger her book seems to suggest she should.

“Because the first spell worked so well,” Wade says, and he’s not wrong. Part of his suit is melted into his skin, courtesy of the acidic venom these things seem to be frothing with, and he’s missing both his guns. He doesn’t look any more up to fighting whatever is about to come through that portal than they do. “We need something fast, Hermione! Our blind date with satan is coming up quickly and I am having _some serious second thoughts_.”

“We’re already too far in! You can’t just call up the ancient gods and be like ‘hey, sorry, gotta go backsies on this sacrifice’,” the witch explains, voice rising an octave or two with panic. “To cancel it we’d have to do something really stupid. Like transfer his soul to someone outside the circle, and it’s not exactly a love tap. You can’t just have two souls. We’re talking one life for another here.”

“What sort of pretentious David Cage bullshit-” Wade begins, but cuts himself off and waves his hand dismissively at her. “Fine, whatever, do your hocus pocus. I’ll be the guinea pig. If you fuck it up again maybe it’ll just kill us all instantly and then we’ll be problem free.”

“That sounds like the opposite of a solution,” Domino mutters, at the same time as Nate manages, through gritted teeth, “Fuck no.”

“Fuck yes,” Wade corrects, spinning on his heel. Behind him, Colossus is yelling and clobbering something scaley with its own disembodied tail. “It’s time to crack that carbonite open, space cowboy. I’m not about to live in a world ruled by whatever young adult romance novel villain is about to come through that big, festive door you’re holding open.”

“Fuck you,” Nate offers, instead, and it’s a shame he can’t break Wade’s teeth when he counters back, without missing a beat, “Here? Now?”

Domino crouches beside where the summoning circle is attempting to dissolve him into the ground and says, voice sympathetic, “Look, I wouldn’t want to give Wade Wilson my soul either, but you’re dying. Maybe have some perspective.”

“Perspective,” Wade echoes and gestures around them a little theatrically. “Like the fact that you’re considering letting Cultist Barbie summon Cthulhu with your corpse out of pure spite. Like some sort of spite apocalypse. The spitecalypse. It sounded better in my head.”

“Still not helping,” Domino reminds him, more patient than any of them, and she adds, gentle, “I don’t want to agree with him, but you’ve got me backed in a corner here.”

She’s not wrong. It does go against everything that he stands for to allow this to happen. Allowing the Earth to be taken over by demonic entities from beyond the veil of time and space is the exact opposite of making sure things don’t go to hell in a handbasket. It doesn’t make any of this any more palatable. It doesn’t make this any less shitty.

“Fine,” he says, still through his teeth. “Get it over with.”

“Don’t sound so resigned, discount timecop,” Wade steps closer to the circle, close enough that his suit is beginning to smoke unpleasantly, “it’s just a little voodoo magic, not your wedding night.”

 

-/-

 

He thinks nothing can hurt worse than whatever curse she’s already put on him. Nothing can possibly hurt worse than feeling his body slowly turn itself inside out. But he’s wrong again, of course. It’s just going to be one of those nights.

Wade must agree, because he starts with a stream of profanity that quickly turns into incoherent screaming.

“Uhhh,” the witch says, over the mayhem, as the summoning circle begins glowing a blinding white, “something isn’t right. He’s supposed to be dead by now. How did I fuck this one up too?!”

“Oh, maybe we should’ve mentioned he can’t die,” Domino says, with a wince, and it’s clear from the look of disbelief on the witch’s face that there were a multitude of answers that might’ve worked and that that was not one of them.

“Shit,” she says, which is probably a bad sign.

Nate feels everything, but only for the time it takes him to pass out face first onto the concrete.

 

-/-

 

It’s hard to tell what the original outcome of the spell was supposed to be, but he wakes up on Colossus’ shoulder on the way back to their borrowed jet and is made immediately aware of the link that now apparently exists between him and Wade.

There’s pain right off the bat, constant and unerring, but it’s not like he’s any stranger to pain. He thinks this is something he’ll ignore, something that he’ll push to the back of his mind until it slots itself in right alongside all of the other shit he’s attempting to ignore, but it doesn’t work that way. Nate’s had plenty of time to adjust to what he puts his own body through, to the pain inherent in his line of work. There’s been years of adjusting – of learning to grit his teeth and find something else to occupy his mind. It makes sense to him that Wade lives much of the same life, trudging through different shades of agony and ignoring them by gritting his teeth and moving the fuck on. The problem is that Wade’s pain is like a fire that won’t burn out, that smolders and flares on its own accord, and one that he doesn’t seem the least bit concerned with putting out.

The symbols that witch’s spell carved into his shoulder aren’t even scabbed over by the time he figures this out. They haven’t even boarded the jet and there’s a handful of those demon beasts already onboard. They come crawling out of the cockpit dripping acidic saliva around mouthfuls of electrical wiring and upholstery, and in the time it takes Nate to raise his gun the dumb fucker he was just soul bound to has already gotten himself bit.

“ _Motherfucker_!” Wade hisses, and throws himself backwards into the wall of the ship - even though all that accomplishes is allowing the thing’s teeth to sink further into his hip. “Down, Lassie! Sit, girl! Heel!”

The acid melts the fabric into his skin, melts the skin into his bones, melts the bone into some putrid liquid that sizzles its way down his leg and starts melting through the metal flooring. Nate should blast it off – already has his gun raised and loaded – but whatever he thought he was prepared for originally has taken a backseat to what his body is unceremoniously plunged into. He doubles over almost instantly, knees hitting the metal floor hard enough that he feels it in his jaw. It feels like the structure of his hip and thigh bones are decomposing inside of him, like its his hip that’s in that thing’s mouth. Whatever he thought this was going to be like, whatever he thought he was going to trudge through with gritted teeth and stubborn will, it’s nothing like this. This is a part of himself that he can’t control, that belongs to someone who considers personal safety and damage mitigation optional at best.

“Stop antagonizing them - you make situation worse!” Colossus demands, as he pries the demonic, fanged monstrosity off of Wade with another host of collateral damage along the way that doesn’t seem to phase him in the slightest. Wade is already back to hobbling around the jet with a katana in hand like fighting without a quarter of his body is just a challenge he’s going to overcome just to prove a point. Nate wants to say he manages to shoot the one that leaps at his own head, but his ears are ringing and his body is on fire, and it’s only Domino’s quick reflexes that saves his jugular from acidic melting. She decapitates the one that lunges at him with Wade’s other, discarded katana and her brow furrows in concern.

“I’m fine,” he snaps, before she can ask, and he can tell by the way her eye twitches that she’s unconvinced. He inhales deeply, ignoring the way it feels like the air should slice through the imaginary opening crawling from his thigh up to his ribcage, and aims his gun at the pack attempting to escape. “Watch that idiot’s back, would you?”

“Before or after I get done watching yours?” she asks, raising an eyebrow, but she still turns and throws the katana, hilt first, into Wade’s outstretched hand. “Trust me, I am full up on idiots.”

 

-/-

 

The demons that crawled out of the portal before they closed it don’t vanish in a heap of theatrical smoke once the spell is over. Instead they disappear into the sewers and subway tunnels, multiplying at a rate that would concern even the most family-oriented cockroach, and leaving a semi-destroyed acidic trail of chaos in their wake.

Operation: Clean Up Somebody Else’s Mess starts with Wade losing an arm straight up to the elbow to the first pack of demons they run into among sewage and poorly planned tunnels. Nate’s traitorous body collapses onto a heap right on cue, like it thinks its being devoured instead of the idiot who decided to charge straight into a pack of carnivorous demons headfirst, and this is going to be his life from now on. This is going to be every waking moment, of every day, for the rest of his life.

It could be worse. It could always be worse. He doesn’t know how it could be worse, but, theoretically, it could be.

The first few days are impossible. Nate can’t anticipate Wade’s stupidity and Wade can’t pause for the three seconds it would take to rethink his impulse decisions. The first few days are Nate attempting to fight through the feeling of rotting flesh and disintegrating bones that don’t belong to him and failing spectacularly.

Every minute is a reminder that nothing is right. There is cold dread slithering up his spine that makes it difficult to remember how to breathe. It is, sometimes for longer moments than he’d like to admit, difficult to remember who he is, and where he is, and why he’s here. It is impossible to ignore the static crackling in his bloodstream, slow and complex and wrong.

“You are lucky to be alive,” Colossus reminds him, always an optimist. His expression is hopeful. “It was close call.”

There’s nothing physically wrong with him, but his skin crawls in places he doesn’t have skin. He feels dangerous impulses and erratic impatience that don’t belong to him.

“Yeah, some luck I’ve got,” he says, and the words feel like sandpaper in his throat.

“Is not ideal circumstance maybe,” Colossus agrees, shrugging his shoulders slowly, “but is circumstance nonetheless.”

‘ _Grin and bear it_ ,’ Nate thinks, humorously, through the spasm in the base of his spine that is entirely unnatural.

That, at least, he is an expert at.

 

-/-

 

Wade Wilson is only part of the problem. Everything has taken some… adjusting.

He’s fixing a battery core on his gun that isn’t responding like it should, when he feels the familiar sensation of being watched.  When he glances up, Russell is sitting on the stairs across from where he’s working, trying and failing to look inconspicuous. It’s been four days of this now – like being tracked by a particularly shitty private eye who stands six feet away and expects you not to notice them. Nate is pretty practiced at ignoring the obnoxious habits of his teammates, but this is something else. It’s definitely a change from their usual pattern of giving one another as wide a berth as possible while still existing in the same hemisphere.

He’s spent all four days ignoring him, but he disconnects a wire that should’ve remained connected, and something sparks abruptly that shouldn’t, and he slams the screwdriver onto the workbench he’s standing at  hard enough to rattle every tool in succession.

“ _What?_ ” he finally snaps, and that must be the magic word, because he’s barely done speaking before Russell has crossed the room to sit on the rickety garage stool that he’s already had to kick out of his way twice. Down the unbreakable thread of mental connection all he can feel is the exhausting energy that Wade exudes like carbon monoxide and it makes it hard to remember what patience is supposed to feel like. This is probably a very bad idea.

“You and Wade are connected now, so does that mean you get to share mutant abilities?” Russell asks, in one breath like he’s been waiting a lifetime to ask. “You get his inability to die and he gets a metal leg or something? Is he supposed to grow one? How does it decide what turns metal and what doesn’t-“

“There some reason you couldn’t have asked him about this?”

“He said your mutant ability was degenerative growth,” Russell explains, and then, in a whisper, “He said that’s why you’re so short.”

“Jesus Christ,” Nate mutters, and picks the screwdriver back up.

“Anyway, I didn’t think he was telling the whole truth and, since we’re teammates, it could do some good to know what sort of powers we’re working with,” Russell gestures at him in a way that shouldn’t bother him, that  shouldn’t make him grip the screwdriver tighter, but it does regardless. “If Wade could grow metal limbs and you could be come back to life-”

“We don’t share _anything_ ,” he interrupts. There is tension in the set of his shoulders that makes the way he’s holding himself uncomfortable. _‘Bad idea_ ,’ he thinks to himself. ‘ _Very bad idea._ ’

“So it’s not -”

The crash that interrupts them, caused by the ceiling tiles caving in above them and depositing Wade Wilson onto the floor beside the workbench, is the strangest relief Nate’s felt in a long while. It envelops him for just long enough that he’s pretty sure it’s not going to go unnoticed by Wade, who stands up in a flourish and makes an obvious show of brushing what is probably asbestos-laden dust from his suit.

“I keep telling Dom we need to spray for termites,” he tells them both, without prompting, and a little louder than is necessary for someone trying to play it cool. He adds, with all his usual subtlety, “Just thought I’d come by and see what you crazy kids are up to. Besides violating your restraining order, I mean. Since you’re definitely doing that.”

“I thought you were joking about that,” Russell mutters, ducking his head. “We’re _teammates_. We get along just fine.”

“Not sure if you know how far a hundred feet is,” Wade continues, undeterred, “I know Freedom Units can be a little confusing. Just take the space you have now and multiply it by the square root of the other side of the X-Base-”

“X-Base is a stupid name.”

“No, _Firefist_ is a stupid name,” Wade counters and then, because he never stops to think before he opens his big dumb mouth, he adds, tilting his head over to Nate, “Does he still go by Firefist in the future?”

The screwdriver in Nate’s left hand bends at a ninety degree angle, the tension returning to the set of his spine like it never left, and Wade gapes openly at him like a fish. Russell hops off of the stool in one go.

“God, but you’re dumb,” he tells Wade, and he’s definitely not wrong. “I’m going to head back upstairs before you get both of us killed.”

“Take me with you,” Wade mock whispers, but makes no move to leave the room. Russell flips him off before ascending back up the stairs he’d come from.

Nate drops the screwdriver back into the toolbox as it is, because the alternative is stabbing Wade in the shoulder with it and it can’t bring him any satisfaction when he’ll fucking feel it too.

“You being in my head twenty four seven doesn’t mean you need to be in my face twenty four seven,” he reminds him. He pulls another screwdriver out of the toolbox, one that’s also seen far better days, and goes back to work on his gun.

“Oh, you know how I get when we’re apart, honey bunny,” Wade replies, as though they’ve already moved on from his faux paus. He flops onto the abandoned stool, rolls it closer, and props his feet up onto the workbench, obnoxiously close to where Nate is trying to get some semblance of work done. “Just ugh. All that longing and desire boiling up. I know you feel it too, it’s all right. It’ll be our little secret.”

“Longing and desire,” Nate echoes, deadpan.

“Or,” Wade continues, tapping the side of his scarred face in mock thoughtfulness, “maybe I could feel you having a panic attack, like a senior on prom night, from halfway across the X-Base. It’s so hard to tell the two apart.”

He’s not wrong, but Nate’s not about to give him the satisfaction of being right. He’s also not even going to consider the distant inkling of gratitude that attempts to rear its ugly head up in the back of his consciousness.

“X-Base is a dumb name,” he agrees, after a long minute.

“You’re a dumb name,” Wade counters, but doesn’t call him on any of his bullshit.

-/-

 

Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, but this just gets worse, and worse, and worse. Maybe there’s a bright light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t a freight train, but Nate’s not holding his breath. He thought this was something he’d grow accustomed to, but there’s pain and there’s suffering and then there’s whatever this is. The pain is easy enough to forget about, to push to the back of his mind with the rest of it he’s ignoring, but it’s not really about the pain. Whatever curse she put on them, whatever she did in order to close that summoning circle, it didn’t save his life – it just prolonged it. The connection between them is unstable, like a storm gathering on the horizon, and it is starting to appear as though it’s going to grow, and grow, and grow, until it tears them apart.

Or, rather, until it tears _him_ apart. Because Wade’s body is meticulously efficient when it comes to healing over anything that might cause him harm. The pain is there, if he can even feel it around the cancer and the consequences of his own reckless behavior, but he doesn’t seem to be in any real danger. Which is great, because Nate’s body is attempting to reject his bones and internal organs as though he no longer needs them.

“Internal struggle,” Colossus says, with a determined nod. “This is sign you need to work together. No more fighting. You must come together as team.”

Wade raises a brow and looks mildly hesitant. “Like… a circle jerk?”

“No, Wade. Bonding time.”

“So… jerking off. In a circle. Together.”

“ _Communication_ ,” Colossus stresses, voice pained. “Resisting this bond may not be in best interest. Resisting may make things even worse.”

“Hey!” Wade calls, across the room, to where Nate is sprawled on the floor waiting for his esophagus to finish deciding if it’s going to rupture or not. “If you give birth to more of those pound puppies from hell I am _not_ going to be happy!”

He feels the thud of footsteps against the floor, and then Wade’s head pops into his line of sight.

“Whenever you’re done with whatever this is,” he says, gesturing expansively at where Nate is still mostly  paralyzed on the floor, “I say we find our little Witch-in-Training and have her un-fuck all of this. I mean, after we finish all the jerking off Mister Rogers wants us to do.”

“Not really a circle with two people,” Nate manages, through his teeth, and even from the floor it’s easy to see Colossus throw his hands up in exasperation on the other side of the room and turn to leave.

 

-/-

 

Finding their needle in a haystack could take longer than they have. They start looking near the warehouse because there are no other leads – there’s nothing else they know about her – and there’s nothing there but half-dissolved bricks and a smudge of uncleaned concrete still tinted red from where Wade hacked up his internal organs. Cinderella hasn’t left them a shoe, or so much as a wayward footprint, but it’s not that surprising. It isn’t as though they actually expected her to still be hanging out around an abandoned warehouse where she almost destroyed the world – they had just sort of hoped she might be.

The surrounding buildings don’t offer any more insight than the last. There is no one around to question and nothing to go on.

“Here’s my master plan,” Wade offers, while he waits patiently for Nate to catch his breath around the furious burning that erupts in his spine without warning around 7th street. “We bypass the next two thousand words of us searching for Kiki’s Delivery Service and get Dom to call the first name in the phone book she sees.”

Nate is too tired to even pretend to mull it over. He spits out a mouthful of blood and says, “Works for me.”

The first number Domino dials is for a Stumptown Coffee on West 29th. Nate is convinced their witch will be gone in the time it takes them to show up, but he’s wrong again. She’s standing  behind the counter, wearing a company logo shirt and a name badge that says ‘Ann.’

“Look, I’m just trying to put the whole thing behind me,” she says, offering them free samples in tiny cups that Wade takes four of. “I’ve re-enrolled in classes. My advisor thinks I can graduate in two years if I really apply myself.”

“So he hasn’t met you yet then,” Wade observes, from around a mouthful of caffeine samples.

“Look, I don’t know anything about soul bonds,” Ann admits, shrugging as though it’s not a big deal when it is the very definition of a big deal. “I’ve never successfully completed one. I thought chucklehead here would die and then we wouldn’t have to worry about connecting all the dots, you get me? But here he is, in the flesh, and - it’s really a level seven spell, is what I’m saying, and I am definitely not a level seven.”

Nate shakes his head in wonder and says, voice dry, “Wow.”

“It’s like a soap opera,” Wade agrees, in quiet awe. “It just gets worse and worse the longer we watch it. Are you saying you can’t fix this?”

“This is as fixed as it’s going to get!” she hisses, leaning over the counter and lowering her voice again. “I did better than anyone else would have given what I had to work with. Look, if you want to blame anyone, blame _yourself._ You were supposed to die. You can’t just introduce monumental changes into the flow of reality that our spells exist in and then expect everything to be okay!”

“I blame him constantly,” Nate assures her, “but this one is entirely you.”

“I’m sorry, but we’re really short on options here,” she replies, face somehow scrunching even further. “The only way we can fix what _you_ fucked up is if we close the soul bond. And the only way to do that is either a) one of you dies, which worked so well the _first_ time, or b) you accept the bond and two souls become one. Whatever that entails - I haven’t really gotten that far, I’ll be honest.”

Wade guffaws expensive coffee into his face mask, to the point where he might be in danger of drowning.

“You are just one crushing disappointment after another,” Nate tells her, and she shrugs as though it doesn’t bother her.

“You sound like my high school guidance counselor,” she says, and her sentence is punctuated by Wade collapsing with a ‘thud’ onto the floor from lack of oxygen.

“Twooo souls become oooone,” Wade manages to get out in a gasp of air, before passing out entirely.

 

-/-

 

Despite what the witch and Colossus may think, they don’t actually have a lot of time to do any ‘bonding.’ They’re a little booked with trying to get rid of all of the demons still chewing up the city.

Theoretically things should get better, or easier, but that’s never been Nate’s personal experience with life as a whole so he’s unsure why he expects it to start now. Wade constantly makes every single thing they attempt to do a goddamned theatrical mess from start to finish. Wade is the kind of person who takes something light years too far and then continues to drag it even further, despite the horrified and repulsed expressions of those around him. Wade is a constant, obnoxious and unapologetic contagion that has infected every aspect of Nate’s life – literally down to his very bones – and he doesn’t know why, for even a single hopeful moment, he thought this might be something like easy.

He can’t even get out of their convoy without Wade trying to steal his gun – half because he’s obsessed with it and half because he probably has some sick, perverted obsession with Nate threatening to gouge out both his eyes with his thumbs – and that says everything about how this soul link or _whatever the fuck it is_ has improved their working relationship.

“So what’s the plan?” Domino asks, when they’re ten minutes from their destination and she feels like wasting her breath. “I mean beyond running in, guns blazing, and fucking up?”

“That’s it,” Wade says. “That’s the whole plan.”

“We’re going to fuck shit up, not fuck up,” Russell reminds her, as though there’s any difference with them.

She glances at Nate, with an eyebrow raised, and he can feel her exasperation when he shrugs too. As far as plans go it’s not like he’s ever done much better. In general this is as strategic as they get.

“Fantastic,” she mutters, and pulls her goggles down over her eyes.

 

-/-

 

It’s not Wade’s fault that they fall twenty feet down, headfirst into the clawed out tunnel leading to one of the demon nests. Nate knows it’s not his fault, because, when they land in a heap at the bottom with a steel-toe boot digging into his kidney and his arm bent at an angle he’s going to regret tomorrow, it’s the very first thing out of Wade’s mouth.

“I hope you’ve got a grappling hook in that ugly ass fanny pack,” is the second thing he says, with his facemask pressed into the curve of Nate’s spine and his body contorted in a way that would’ve killed anyone else. He groans and twists, using Nate’s shoulder and ribcage to attempt to maneuver himself back into a sitting position. He’s making as much noise as humanly possible, because he has no concept of self-preservation and doesn’t give a shit that there could be any number of these acid spewing things down here with them, and Nate can’t even find it in himself to be annoyed. Complacency is going to get him killed.

He shoves Wade off of him and manages to get to his own feet. There’s very little light drifting down from the maintenance room they’d been in and Nate’s optical eye dilates and adjusts to compensate even though he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to know what they’re going to find down here. The tunnel seems to go much further than where they’ve fallen, twisting much further underground than he’s sure either of them had planned to go today, but it’s not like they’re going back up the way they came so they might as well go drop some grenades into a nest of demons.

This close it’s impossible not to feel the adrenaline thrumming along the air between them with nowhere else to go. He doesn’t expect to feel regret, or remorse, for getting them into this situation coming from Wade – and he doesn’t - but the trepidation he does feel is surprising. It’s comforting in a way, because at least it means he doesn’t want to be here anymore than Nate does.

“Well, one of us isn’t getting any younger,” Wade says, and he makes his way towards the available tunnel with a pistol in each hand. The tunnel has been crudely carved out of concrete and dirt with unearthly claws, the jagged walls a reminder of what it is they’re about to go hunting for in the near-pitch black. “I was hoping we’d get to fight out way out of a broom closet today. I’m so lucky. Do you think Dom feels jealous?”

“Talk louder,” Nate suggests.“Maybe you’ll draw them all on top of us at once.”

“Well we sure as fuck would know where they were then, wouldn’t we? You know, this would be a lot easier if you just read their minds and find out where they’re coming from,” Wade says, and it’s strange how bitter he sounds for someone making absolutely no sense. “I mean, sure, you’d have to filter through all the demonic gibberish about how ass-clenchingly delicious my fucking face must be, since they won’t stop trying to _eat it_ , but after that maybe we’d get somewhere.”

Nate stares at the back of his masked head for a long minute, and then gives up entirely on trying to figure out this particular word vomit of an anagram.  “What the fuck are you on?”

“Russell told me all about your super secret telepathy powers. Which you apparently told him about, even though you don’t like him, and didn’t tell me – even though our souls are bound in some alternate demonic dimension beyond time and space. Which is cool!  I’m not angry, I’m just _disappointed_.”

“It’s telekinesis, not telepathy, you moron. And it’s not a god damned secret. How did you think I was pulling my gun out of your hands from across the room _every time you stole it_?”

“Magnets.”

“Magnets,” Nate repeats, deadpan. “And the shield?”

Wade shrugs. “Also magnets.”

“The shield is made from magnets?”

“I don’t know how magnets work so really they could do anything, couldn’t they?”

“Jesus christ.”

“So telekinesis. Can you kill a yak from two hundred yards away? With _mind bullets?_ ” Wade stops short and Nate nearly runs into him when he turns around to raise his brows through the mask. “Or could you, in theory, propel me through this tunnel at terminal velocity towards the Paw Patrol inevitably waiting at the other side?”

“No.”

“You can’t… or you won’t?”

“No to anything you’re asking - past, present, or future,” Nate clarifies, and he grabs onto the strap across Wade’s chest with his left hand, jerks him forward hard enough that it’s more a stumble than anything else, and fires at the glowing green jaws leaping towards them. The demon falls four feet away from them, smoking and smoldering, and the gunshot echoes down the tunnel - to the answering symphony of glowing green and low, gravely rumbling.

“Holy Scooby snacks!” Wade yelps, and he flails in the general direction of the still-smoking demon corpse, indignant. “See?! My face is _magically delicious_!”

“Do me a favor and _don’t_ get anything chewed off this time!” Nate snaps, which is poetic in a way, because the words are barely out of his mouth before acidic, demonic teeth sink into his cybernetic shoulder.

“Oh, so it’s okay when you do it?!” Wade’s legs buckle underneath him, like both his kneecaps have been blown out, but he still shoots Nate’s new arm accessory in the head on his way down.  

 Nate staggers backwards, back hitting the wall. He shudders twice, a full body tremor he can’t seem to shake, and he knows he’s taking too long to raise his gun back up, but the acid is dripping down into the wiring of his cybernetics and it’s not pretty. He hazily registers Wade digging a fist into his utility belt and hauling him bodily back down the way they came, the clinking and rattling of grenades trailing behind them.

 “Must go faster, must go faster,” Wade chants, and then the blast throws them the rest of the way up the tunnel like ragdolls.

 

-/-

 

It says a lot about how bad things are getting that he would even consider allowing Wade to put his hands anywhere near the cybernetic workings of his body, let alone actually allow him to do so, but things really are just that bad. There is a mechanical whirring in his ear that is louder than it should be, and most of the feeling in the left side of his neck is gone completely. It only makes sense that, in the midst of all of this, their super special bond would decide to continue attempting to separate his skeleton from his body.

 “It’s simple math, alright? There were ten demon dogs, and we killed ten, so now there’s only forty two left,” Wade explains, mostly to himself, and it takes both of them to get Nate up onto the workbench. “They’re fucking like rabbits at the winter Olympics out there.”

 “Toolbox,” Nate instructs, and his flesh fingers are pressing as hard as they’re able into the pressure points of his temples, where his skull feels as though it is cracking underneath his skin. It’s hard to see, with whatever is throbbing behind his head attempting to gouge out what remains of his consciousness, but if he passes out there’s no telling what destruction Wade will manage. “Not the hammer - get the ice pick. And the soldering iron.”

 “This collection of tools you’re hoarding look like they’re from the set of Dexter,” Wade notes, and slides right up onto the workbench like he’s been invited. He’s still wearing his suit, still smells like whatever rancid flesh-eating contagion those things spew out, and it’s hard to get a read on what’s going through his head when Nate’s having trouble keeping his own on his shoulders. “Now you just need a sexy black henley and a complicated home life. Can I just jam this thing in anywhere? That’s not even the first time I’ve asked that today.”

 Nate inhales deeply and exhales again slowly, half for patience and half because breathing has suddenly become a laborious chore. He reaches blindly back around to his own neck, where there’s a rotator damaged at the junction of his neck and shoulder, and places a finger on top of the tiny space where it meets. “Between here. _Do not_ ‘jam’ it.”

 “You’re expecting a lot of precision out of someone who wears Velcro shoes because he can’t tie a bow.”

 It’s been a long time since he’s had to make a repair, and Wade is nothing like his regular mechanic, but beggars can’t be choosers. The tip of the ice pick wedges into the crevice, a half inch farther than it would have if he were doing it himself, but isn’t forceful enough to damage anything else. It takes several enthusiastic tries to pry the damaged plate up, with Wade balancing on his knees on the workbench and using his flesh shoulder for leverage, but eventually it does give and the whirring slows and stops completely.

 He’s gotten pretty good at putting the cybernetics into stasis for repairs, shutting down enough that he’s not rooting around in his own nerve endings while adjusting screws and soldering wires, but it’s hard to focus on it with everything else going on in his head. He feels Wade pry the panel loose, feels every amateur movement of the ice pick against the inside of his shoulder and then, worryingly, the distinct feeling of confusion across the mental line they share.

 “Oh, wow, yeah that definitely looks like I have no idea what I’m looking at.”

 “Braided set of six wires,” Nate tells him and briefly considers reaching for them, to point them out, but it’s too difficult to control his own movements. With Wade so close it’s difficult to pinpoint his own thoughts from the jumble of someone else’s pressing against the sides of his mind. One of them is anxious, the restlessness of it vibrating in the tips of their fingers, and it should bother him more that he can’t tell if it’s his or not.

 “Six wires,” Wade repeats, and then his fingers are digging around inside of Nate’s shoulder, brushing against wires and nano-tech that he’s probably going to fuck up - and the familiar,  searing pain wrenching its way through Nate’s body and head stalls completely. From the first slide of leather against the wires in his neck, Nate’s vision clears like a fog is lifted, like someone has flipped a light switch he couldn’t find, and suddenly everything is ten steps back towards how it had been before all this soul bond mess started.

 Or, better. Not the same, definitely not the same. He can almost hear Wade muttering to himself, but the words are brushing against the back of his mind in a feather-like touch that implies it might not even be audible. There’s a burst of curiosity, followed by a distracted flurry of emotions that don’t make any real sense, and he doesn’t get a chance to analyze anything other than the tremor that spikes through him when Wade gets his fingers around the loose wires he’d been searching for.

 ‘ _What the hell?_ ’ he thinks, and before he’s even finished his thought there’s an unmistakable,  sharp jolt of white hot arousal down his spine that definitely shouldn’t be caused by Wade Wilson’s nervous hands inside his cybernetics. The blunt tip of Wade’s gloved thumb presses against the edge of the power distribution block, where the wire used to be connected before it was ripped out, and Nate sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth as his flesh hand slaps flat against the workbench. There is heat pooling low in his groin, his thighs tense in a way that has nothing to do with pain, and his second attempt at a quiet breath ends in a groan low in the back of his throat.

Wade’s right knee slips against the workbench as he fumbles with the ice pick, which he thankfully doesn’t stab Nate with, and his attempt at overcompensating throws the rest of his balance completely off. He falls off the back of the workbench and half lands on the rolling stool, which upends underneath his weight and then rolls off across the room. There a surge of pain in his arm and Nate can tell, without looking, that Wade has managed to stab himself in the forearm with the ice pick.

“Shitfuck,” Wade hisses, and Nate curls his flesh fingers around the edge of the workbench until the metal is digging uncomfortably into his palm. Wade manages to get back onto his feet and pulls his mask off in one go. His neck is flushed, down into collar of his suit, and he takes a couple of deep breaths that don’t seem to go very far towards calming him.

Nate stares resolutely ahead, like nothing is possibly out of the ordinary. He tries not to tense when Wade climbs back onto the workbench and settles back into his space.

“Hoo, sweet tapdancing Christ,” Wade mutters, and then slaps himself in the face - twice. “Okay, I’ve got this. That was just a test run. I’m in the zone now.”

The second time isn’t better. The edge of the workbench continues to cut into Nate’s palm, as Wade recommences rummaging around in his neck like he’s searching for the god damned Holy Grail. Part of him thinks he can grit his teeth and get through whatever betrayal his body is apparently going to put him through for the next ten minutes, but that part is getting quieter and quieter by the second. This would have been humiliating with anyone, because it’s never happened before - and, of course, the first time is going to have to be while he has a fucking emotional connection with Wade Wilson.

It takes ten agonizing seconds for Wade to rediscover the wire and to find where it should attach to. Ten seconds is long enough for the flush in Nate’s chest to work it’s way down to the base of his spine, to curl itself around every bone in his body in a way that is nothing like the pain he experienced before but every bit as distracting. Wade’s knees are bracketing his left hip and he can feel every point where they touch, every shift of where the leather of Wade’s suit rubs against the worn material of his pants.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Wade says underneath his breath, to himself, or maybe to Nate - but Nate is far too busy staring straight ahead and focusing on not cracking his own teeth. For a brief moment Wade pulls his hands away, just long enough for Nate to get a breath of cool air, and then they’re back in his neck and the gloves are gone. It’s just the scarred skin of Wade’s fingers sliding along the wires and circuits in his neck, like a god damned caress, and Nate is achingly hard in his pants.

“You know, I’m trying to distract myself with unsexy thoughts of Stan Lee naked while playing golf, and your eye searingly ugly fanny pack, and laundry detergent,” Wade says, and maybe it’s not Nate’s imagination that his hands are shaking when he steadies them against his bare  shoulders for a moment, “but if you don’t stop moaning like we’re trying to get to a hundred thousand subscribers on PornHub I’m going to jizz in my pants.”

That shouldn’t be the thing that turns him on more, but he can feel his cock twitch in interest and there’s nothing he can do to stop the burst of arousal that spreads through him like wildfire. He does feel a flash of humiliation, and something else that feels a little like _nerves_ of all fucking things, but it occurs to him that he has no idea who those feelings belong to either. It strikes him abruptly that it’s possibly from _both_ of them. It occurs to him that he’s not the only one panting and gritting their teeth, breaking out into a sweat on the workbench.

Anger flares up in him for a moment, along with the urge to brush Wade off completely and attempt to finish the repairs himself, but he’s not stupid. The pain that’s been assaulting him on and off in varying degrees of agony over the last few weeks has ebbed away to a calm he hasn’t felt in a long damned time. It would be stupid not to make the connection of Wade’s presence, of him three feet past the barrier of personal space, and how that’s the only thing that has even begun to help. It would be stupid to cause irreversible damage to himself to intentionally ignore what is staring him in the face.

“This hasn’t happened before,” Nate says, and he can’t help the defensiveness in his tone, in the tenseness of his spine. “I’m _trying_ to control it.”

He thinks, for a moment, that Wade is going to put the tools down and back away, but he doesn't. Instead he pushed the sleeves of his suit up past his wrists and picks the soldering iron back up.

“Maximum effort,” Wade says, mostly to himself, and Nate braces his arm against the workbench again just before Wade’s fingers start sorting back through the inside of his neck.

The heat radiating from Wade’s body does nothing to assist with the flush that immediately worms its way back across Nate’s skin like it had never left. Wade hovers over him, with the bare skin of his forearms braced on his shoulder blades and the soldering iron emanating heat all along loose nerve endings, and it’s all Nate can do to keep himself upright.

He can feel every single press of the pad of Wade’s thumb against the braid of wires he’s holding. He can feel every shift of his hands, every breath against exposed cybernetics. The first touch of the soldering iron against his neck makes the display in his left eye flicker, makes his jaw lock up so tightly he can feel the twitch all the way down into his shoulder. It should be impossible to tell through the Deadpool suit that Wade is hard against his hip, but the helpful connection they share broadcasts it like a radio.

“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Wade says, voice strained, “ _you suck at controlling it_.”

He manages to get the wire connected back where it goes, and the press of the soldering iron to fuse it together tears a truly obscene moan from Nate’s mouth that he can’t bite down on fast enough. All of the circuits are lined back up, and the feeling flows back into his neck and down his elbow into his fingers in one smooth wave. The current tingles, almost like an impulse, and he curls his metal fingers into what he belatedly realizes is Wade’s knee to ground himself.

Wade is fire underneath his hand, burning so bright that for a second it’s the only thing he’s aware of, and it’s impossible to ignore. The heat radiating from Wade is in his head, cascading down his spine like memories of the electrical currents. Despite their joking this isn’t actually what Colossus meant when he said team bonding, but it’s working like nothing else has.

The soldering iron hits the floor, along with Wade’s boots, and for a moment Nate thinks he’s running away. He manages to get his hand around Wade’s elbow, unsure of what he’s even planning on saying - unsure of _himself_ \- but he’s prepared to swallow his pride to stop either of them from fucking this up even more than they have. It’s unwarranted though. Wade only goes as far as the side of the workbench, only moves to situate himself between Nate’s thighs with a smoothness that is entirely belied by the flurry of uncertain and unsure emotions that are flittering mentally between them at an even tempo.

“This is usually the part of the fantasy where you stab me,” Wade says, when Nate does nothing to stop him from sliding his hands up his thighs to grip onto his hips. “And I don’t mean with your dick.”

“Night’s still young,” Nate offers, and Wade takes that as permission to pull him off of the workbench onto his feet.

It’s hard to say which of them moves first, but Wade is unbuckling his belt and he’s fumbling with the unintuitive zippers on the Deadpool suit in the same breath. He backs the both of them as much away from the table - away from the power tools and soldering iron that nobody has bothered to turn off - that he can manage and doesn’t argue when Wade turns and presses him up against the cold concrete of the basement wall. It takes some doing to get the suit pushed down around his hips, his skin sweaty and still smeared with blood from earlier, but Wade’s cock is huge and angry-red against his stomach, already obscenely wet at the tip. Nate gets his right hand around it and smooths his thumb over the leaking head, someone’s breath hitching in the back of his throat.

Like with everything else, Wade has more finesse than anyone would ever assume. His hand is scarred like the rest of him, rough and uneven, and Nate feels it curl around his cock, tight and perfect and unbearably warm, without looking. His grip is firm, even as two of his fingers massage the flared tip, and Nate curls his metal fingers around the scruff of Wade’s neck without stopping to think about it. It’s strangely intimate, which he feels flush between them in a burst of emotions he can’t decipher, and all at once there is nothing that belongs to him - and yet, somehow, everything he feels is his own.

“I’m gonna remember this the next time you lecture me about personal space,” Wade whispers in his ear, purely to be obnoxious.

“Do you _ever_ fucking shut up?”

“Oh, are we still pretending you don’t want me? So that _is_ a machete in your pocket, then!”

“I don’t have to want you, shithead,” Nate hisses. “You’re already mine.”

Wade huffs out a surprised laugh - and that’s strangely, weirdly intimate too. It’s not nearly as strange as when Wade grabs his jaw with his free hand, turns his face, and kisses him. For a long, tense second there is a coil of uncertainty that wraps itself back around Nate’s mind, but it’s gone like steam. There is no uncertainty in the slow and soft movements of Wade’s mouth, hand still working his cock and tongue matching pace as it licks past his lips and teeth. Wade kisses like he thinks he’s in charge, like he has any fucking idea what Nate wants.

Nate moves a hand from Wade’s neck to his shoulder, metal thumb pressing into the curve of his collar. Maybe some part of him thinks he might shove him away, might push him back and away and pretend he’s wrong, but instead all he does is allow himself to be crowded against the concrete by the press of Wade’s insistent mouth. Wade shifts, just enough that Nate is startlingly aware that the hardness pressing against his own is another cock, and then it’s Wade’s hand around his while he jerks them both off. Wade licks down his jaw, down along where the seam of skin meets metal, and Nate comes hard. His shoulders are shaking, his thighs trembling, his cock spurting into their fists when Wade’s tongue finds his mouth again.

Wade kisses him slow, and careful, and for far too long to be explained away. When he pulls away it’s only to rest his head on his bare shoulder, breathing heavy and heart still racing hard enough that Nate thinks he could feel it even without being connected.

“I see the error of my ways now,” Wade says. “I should’ve become a mechanic years ago.”

“Don’t quit your day job,” Nate suggests, breathless, and he’s unsure if the fondness he feels is coming from him or Wade.

It’s just his luck that it’s probably both.

 

-/-

 

The voice of reason in the back of his head isn’t as loud as it used to be - probably because he’s sharing his common sense with a brain dead hummingbird. There’s a pulse underneath his skin that doesn’t belong to him, and something building in the back of his head that isn’t his alone, but it’s all simmering politely now in a way he’s starting to get used to.

“Personal space, Wilson,” Nate reminds him, for what might as well be the hundredth time in as many minutes for the good it does, but there’s no bite behind it.

“How personal are we talking?” Wade asks, and he slides the pistol he stole an hour earlier back into the holster at Nate’s thigh. He’s done it enough times that his motions should be smooth with practiced ease, but his hands are shaking with adrenaline - still trigger happy, even if there are no more bullets left in the gun. “I can make any space very, uncomfortably personal.”

Across the transport, Domino stares at them with narrowed eyes. “It’s like a train wreck. I can’t look away.”

“This is all your fault,” Russell says, poking a finger in Colossus’ unyielding arm. “ _Team bonding_ , my ass.”

Colossus folds his arms across his chest and nods, oddly satisfied, and echoes, in agreement, “Team bonding.”

 


End file.
